Umbrella Network’s Collaboration with MetalCore: Unlocking GameFi’s Potential

Just a few months ago, a new NFT-based combat game made a tidal wave when it was first revealed to the gaming and blockchain communities.

As one of the first-ever MMO mechanized combat games built specifically with NFT and blockchain components, MetalCore stands out from the crowd with its stunning graphics, compelling storylines, deeply talented team, and action-filled gameplay. MetalCore’s robust in-game economy will allow players to buy, sell, and trade NFTs. It’s one of the few games to be able to combine high-quality visuals and gameplay with NFT-based asset ownership along with social, faction-based gaming dynamics.

And for those who have been paying close attention, a connection to Umbrella via our technology and our acceleration strategy has been revealed.

So today, as MetalCore Foundation announces the completion of a private token and NFT sale, I’d like to take the opportunity to talk more about why MetalCore, why Umbrella, and why now?

Our Incubation Thesis

Metaverse and NFT Gaming are undoubtedly the topic du jour. It seems like there is a new game or game-focused fund appearing every day with some eye-popping amount raised. Umbrella knew from the start gaming would be a perfect category for decentralized oracles, but we have been judicious in avoiding the hype and finding the perfect collaboration to fit our mission and our growth strategy.

Late last year, we announced the Umbrella Ecosystem Accelerator, a program dedicated to companies fostering growth and bringing data solutions to the blockchain. The accelerator’s mission is to prevent limited data access and high costs from impacting the development of innovative decentralized applications.

Today, MetalCore Foundation announced a $15 million private token and NFT sale, fueling the industry’s first massively multiplayer online (MMO) combat game that combines the engagement of high-quality traditional gaming with NFT ownership that is intricately designed into gameplay.

With participation from well-known entities including Delphi Digital, BITKRAFT, Immutable X, Sanctor Capital, Animoca, Youbi Capital, and Bitscale, Umbrella also has the honor of participating in this token and NFT sale. A number of leading gaming guilds including YGG, YGG SEA, Merit Circle, Perion, Avocado, and BreederDAO, among others, have also participated.

Umbrella has also welcomed MetalCore into Umbrella’s Ecosystem Accelerator as the first blockchain-based gaming company, joining Sandstorm (metaverse) as our next accelerator project, with more to come. The Umbrella Community Council has shown support and enthusiasm for this collaboration and has voted to approve Umbrella’s participation in the private token and NFT sale.

However, while MetalCore’s prospects and future potential are certainly bright, that is not the main reason Umbrella is excited to be involved.

Umbrella believes that blockchains today, including the fastest second-generation blockchains currently on the market, are incapable of handling game logic of any real complexity. This herein lies our eagerness about MetalCore — a consumer-facing, high-quality product whose lifeblood depends on the speed, security, and cost-effectiveness of its data on-chain.

For example, even the earliest versions of Angry Birds couldn’t run its logic on-chain or on any reasonably decentralized Layer 2 protocol. The latency of a decentralized network itself would be insurmountable today. Imagine a first-person shooter where network latency results in 500+ millisecond delays. Perhaps it does not sound like much, but it would seem like a lifetime of frustration and negatively impact your gameplay.

Gamers, especially sufficiently good ones, expect instant responses, and would most likely abandon the game with such delayed performance. Thus, for the foreseeable future, we must get accustomed to the idea that game logic and most computations for the gaming industry will remain on centralized systems with low latency times.

Operating at the Speed of Gaming (without Explosive Costs)

So how does GameFi (play-to-earn) work if the logic and computation are residing on centralized systems? That is why Umbrella is excited about MetalCore. Umbrella is the lowest-cost blockchain oracle in the market today. With its Merkle Tree based sidechain, there effectively is no incremental cost of adding additional data.

And this is important because of the sheer volume of data a game produces. The size of a player’s Playfab account data would be prohibitively expensive to store on-chain, not to mention the regularity of the updates to that data. If you look at Playfab’s pricing model, they price based on millions of events. How can any blockchain or Layer 2 handle this sheer volume cost-effectively?

Umbrella, through this partnership, is looking to answer the questions:

• What data should we bring on-chain, and
• What’s the best way to access that data to ensure the security and provenance of that data while still operating at gaming speed?

Umbrella engineers get to see the game development process as it progresses, which allows us to fully understand where the data is being generated and stored. Collaboration can often serve as education as well, from which Umbrella plans take this learning process and expand further into GameFi.

Umbrella already has exposure to this area through its acquisition of Lucidity Tech. Lucidity does for digital advertising what Umbrella aims to achieve for GameFi.

Its technology identifies the key touchpoints along the digital advertising supply chain to determine what data to ingest into the blockchain, and it operates a smart contract to generate a clean dataset that can be used by advertisers to identify fraud, remove unviewable ads and ultimately generate a single billable metric.

Similarly, through collaboration, Umbrella aims to identify the data that is valuable for GameFi and ultimately make that data available for GameFi smart contracts.

Next Steps for Umbrella and GameFi Oracles

So what are some examples?

Without giving away all of our secrets, you can see the potential for game data on-chain. Today, guilds are the primary sources of NFTs for “scholars” in games like Axie Infinity. That is largely because guilds have the balance sheet to acquire and manage the NFTs.

But imagine a decentralized world where the supply of NFTs is decentralized. Anybody can provide NFTs into a Guild Pool or NFT Pool where “scholar” winnings are shared directly on-chain based on the events that are happening on centralized game servers.

This would unlock the potential for a liquidity pool-based DEX (AMM) like Uniswap for gaming. Or you can even imagine an aggregator like 1INCH that automatically allocates NFTs across different Guild Pools based on returns. This is a single and quite honestly not groundbreaking use of a GameFi oracle that Umbrella aims to build, but one that is familiar to anybody that has been a part of the DeFi revolution.

We see far greater potential for GameFi, but it is dependent on gaming services like oracles to provide the data they need to unlock the potential. And stay tuned…GameFi is just one of many categories that will benefit from superior decentralized oracles.